Questions of the whether animals are capable of complex emotions aside, I totally get what Heart is on about - I'm the same. I wouldn't say I was a fluffy hysterically emotional sort but for some reason I have an inexplicably inherent sympathy for the feelings of all sorts creatures and things. Its difficult to explain without making me sound like a nutter
. Its an intrinsic, instinctive unconscious impression that all things have some sort of emotional quality, admittedly, mostly of the imagined, projected kind. I have real trouble throwing things away because of this. If I accidently break something I was given as a child, even if I don't have a particular love of it, I will be upset and struggle to throw the pieces out. The best that I can explain it is, it feels like its destroying and discarding part of my childhood and disrespecting the person who gave it to me etc etc - and I end up racked with feelings of guilt. As I've said in other threads,
INFPs see meaning in everything
Qre:us, it might be that your mum feels sensitive about what is hers to protect and defend. She may see that bird as a part of what defines her, it is something she loves and cares about and for people to laugh and make comments about it would, by extension, be perceived as a indirect attack on her. She wants to keep the bird out of it so she doesn't have to explain or justify the behaviour of the bird, and therefore, herself.
Yes....and this raises an intriguing question, we seem to come across very often on this forum:
* can morality be rational? Can [subjective] morality be rational?
I gave tongue-in-cheek funny examples...to kinda stretch the points to obvious 'irrationality'...but, then it falls back on rationalizing through the morality itself, which brings us back to doe a deer the subjective evaluation of morality (Fi+Ne), meh....
(humour is so subjective)
I think morality can be rational, believe me I've taken philosophy and ethics classes. In those classes you hade to provide logical step-by-step argument as to why something is ethical or not.